Ubuntu 13.04 has been released, with the Linux 3.8.8 kernel, a faster and less resource hungry Unity desktop, LibreOffice 4.0, and much more. Ubuntu users will know where to get it, and you're looking for a new installation, have fun. Also fun: UbuntuKylin.

Ubunutu upgrades have failed me in the past, but in your case without more details, is it possible that you are judging Ubuntu for what may be a third party problem? Vmware is after all a third party proprietary app you had to install from outside the repos.

The last time I installed vmware on linux, it needed to compile some kernel-specific extensions before it could run, that would very likely break during an OS upgrade. Of course I can understand why you want it to just work, but did you try to reinstall it? Just curious.

The first thing I did was to install a stable version of centos (or maybe it was some other stable distro with VMware support, I can't remember), just to find that it did not support the filesystem I had used for the disk where all my files were stored... By that time I had already spent the morning and stress was going through the roof so I ran to the nearest apple shop.

Sure it was a linux kernel dev who changed an interface, perhaps not knowing it would break apps using the interface...Then all the testers in ubuntu forgot to test using vmware. That or they all knew VMware was broken but couldn't care less...I don't know, it just ended up on my desk being broken.

I am bringin up this quote from the EA dev team mailing list:
"How EA killed their own market:
They tried for years with DRM to protect our multiplayer games, and lost heavily. The new approach is alwasy on DRM and even though we had 4 million pre-orders of sim city 5, we are still losing money ont that turd. Sim city 4 was awesome and is still one of the best selling EA games. EA made the NHL 2003 which is still the best sports game ever made.
Always on is equaling sadness for the consumer, death to free gaming and origin allthough i thought it would just be a steam competitor it has turned in to the worst place to get games, as we can not guarantee our uptime.
Steam DRM might be a teeny bit invasive sometimes, but atleast they are not assholes about their games demanding 100% uptime on the net.

For all the devs, make sure your game is rendering through opengl properly, or you WILL lose all the powervr users (iphone and android stuff) and also all the macs and linux. Linux as a gaming plattform has allready surpassed the mac in steam sales and if your game sells 100 copies it might not be worth it in the first place. But if you are interested in the Linux market: Sell your games through steam until we can get a origin client for linux, 10 cutoff in price is easily worth it. Ask Crotech who sold serious sam 3, a hard title for the PC as a linux game. They have earned more than half of their revenue from the game-starved linux community whilst their competitors squabble over the decreasing windows sales.
"

That's just trolling. He exercised his right to install 3rd party software, which he wouldn't have gotten at all in a walled garden. The point was that the responsibility for 3rd party software quality assurance lies with you, the end user, or the 3rd party software vendor. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just the simple fact of the matter.